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Saturday 27 July 2024
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Arthur C Clarke Award
This award has been given since 1987 for the best sf novel whose UK first edition was published during the previous calendar year, and consists of an inscribed bookend and a sum of money from a grant initially donated by Arthur C Clarke. In 2001 the prize money – until then a constant £1000 – was increased to £2001 as a gesture to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); it has since risen by ...
Langdon-Davies, John
(1897-1971) South African-born poet and author, mostly in the UK from the age of six, a pacifist in World War One, and much involved in Spain and its conflicts during the interWar years; he is of some sf interest for A Short History of the Future (1936), which – like J D Bernal's The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929 chap) – is essentially an exercise in Futures Studies ...
Halperin, James L
(1952- ) US numismatist, businessman and author of two sf novels of interest: The Truth Machine (1996) generates a positive read from the Invention of a fool-proof Lie Detector, though Near Future America is subjected to some turmoil; and The First Immortal (1998), a Sleeper Awakes tale in which an entire family ...
Carrel, Frederic
(1859-1945) UK author whose portrait of Frank Harris in an early novel, The Adventures of John Johns (1897), has been a source of misinformation about Harris for more than a century. Paul le Maistre (1901) is not sf, the invention at the heart of the book being a better plough; on the other hand, the Inventions of the Antihero ruler of an ambivalently ...
Wu Dingbo
(1941- ) Chinese academic and sf scholar based at the English Department of the Shanghai International Studies University. His PhD in English is from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, his dissertation being titled "Utopias by American Women". With Patrick Murphy he edited Science Fiction from China (anth 1989), an important English-language sampler which contains eight Chinese sf stories and a chronological bibliography. He was a ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...